At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Monday, Washington’s deputy Ambassador to the body “condemned” Moscow’s deployment of an “Oreshnik” (“Hazelnut Tree”) missile at Western Ukraine last week.
“We condemn Russia’s continuing and intensifying attacks on Ukraine’s energy facilities and other civilian infrastructure,” said Deputy UN Ambassador Tammy Bruce.
A release from Russia’s Defense Ministry on Monday said that one of its Oreshnik ballistic missiles hit an aviation repair plant in the Lviv region.
At the emergency UN meeting convened to discuss Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure of Ukraine, as hundreds of thousands of citizens are without heat and electricity in freezing temperatures, Bruce contended that Moscow’s use of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in Ukraine, “constitutes another dangerous and inexplicable escalation of this war, even as the United States is urgently working with Kyiv, other partners and Moscow to end the war through a negotiated settlement.”
The Kremlin has countered that the missile was fired in response to Ukraine’s attempt to strike one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residences – a claim that Kyiv has demonstrated to be false, as has the United States.
UN Undersecretary General Rosemary DiCarlo told the Security Council:
“Large-scale aerial assaults by the Russian Federation against civilians and critical civilian infrastructure across the country have resulted in horrific levels of destruction and suffering. As temperatures plummet far below freezing, the Russian Federation has intensified its systematic attacks targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.”
Acting British ambassador James Kariuki called the attack “reckless,” adding that “it threatens regional and international security and carries significant risk of escalation and miscalculation.”
While the experimental ballistic weapon targeted the western region, a wider, coordinated swarm of 270 missiles and drones that evening focused its fury on Kyiv, killing at least four people, damaging the Qatari embassy, and plunging nearly 6,000 apartment buildings into a sub-zero blackout.
“A clear reaction from the world is needed,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote. “Above all from the United States, whose signals Russia truly pays attention to.”
The nuclear-capable weapon has been vaunted by the Kremlin as impossible to intercept, hitting a speed of Mach 10, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has claimed. He said in 2024 that Oreshnik was “not a modernization of an old, Soviet system” but a “modern, state-of-the-art” device.
Experts say the missile can travel at hypersonic speeds, but cannot be maneuvered in the same way typical hypersonic missiles can.
“As with other intermediate- and intercontinental-ballistic missiles, its warheads enter the atmosphere and reach their targets at hypersonic speeds,” Marcin Andrzej Piotrowski, analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM) said in 2024.
Putin tried to instill fear in the West with the appearance of the missile in Belarus just before New Year’s Eve.